A study of recent New York political history focuses on the causes of the fiscal crisis, the influence of organized crime, and the power of corporations

Low-income housing in crisis -- From renters to owners -- Remaking public parks -- Patrolling city streets -- The trouble with development -- The governance of homelessness and public space.

New Yorkers have always been pressed for space in life and in death. Central Park is synonymous with New York City. But without Green-Wood Cemetery, located in South Brooklyn, Central Park would have never existed. Founded in 1838, Green-Wood became the city’s most popular tourist attraction. The cemetery was so popular that urban planners challenged architects to come up with plans for a separate green-space for Manhattan. Hence, both Central Park, founded in 1857, and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in 1867, were born. Green-Wood presented not only a place to bury the dead but a meditative haven away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Other cemeteries followed in the park style, including Sleepy Hollow and Woodlawn. New York’s changing cultural landscape made Ferncliff Cemetery one of the most coveted places to spend eternity, with the rising popularity of Westchester County and suburban living. New Yorkers even secured a place for the four-legged members of the family with Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, now the largest and oldest pet cemetery in the United States. From the movers and shakers of New York society, to corrupt political bosses and mafiosi, Jazz legends, and a Brooklyn native son who returned to Green-Wood as one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, the stories of the permanent residents of these cemeteries are just as diverse and vibrant as the city itself. To travel through the cemeteries of New York is to travel through the hidden history of what some consider to be the greatest city in the world.

Based on the award-winning, critically acclaimed exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, New York at Its Core takes readers on a whirlwind journey through the 400-year history of the five boroughs to find out how a striving village on the periphery of the Dutch trading empire became the booming metropolis that is today¿s capital of the world. New York at Its Core finds the key in four defining themes that have shaped the city since its inception: money, diversity, density, and creativity. This lavishly illustrated book features nearly 400 objects and images from the one-of-a-kind exhibition, revealing how these themes evolved and interacted to create the city we know today, a subject of fascination the world over visited by millions of people every year. Covering New York¿s entire 400-year history and inviting a look into the city¿s future, New York at Its Core chronicles the cycles of crisis and reinvention that gave rise to one of the world¿s most diverse and densely populated places, a city that has shaped the course of events for the nation and the world.

In the summer of 1948, E.B. White sat in a New York City hotel room and, sweltering in the heat, wrote a remarkable pristine essay, Here is New York. Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, the author’s stroll around Manhattan—with the reader arm-in-arm—remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America’s foremost literary figures. Here is New York has been chosen by The New York Times as one of the ten best books ever written about the city. The New Yorker calls it “the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city.”

A New York Times Notable Book A lively, immersive history by an award-winning urbanist of New York City’s transformation, and the lessons it offers for the city’s future. Dangerous, filthy, and falling apart, garbage piled on its streets and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble; New York’s terrifying, if liberating, state of nature in 1978 also made it the capital of American culture. Over the next thirty-plus years, though, it became a different place—kinder and meaner, richer and poorer, more like America and less like what it had always been. New York, New York, New York, Thomas Dyja’s sweeping account of this metamorphosis, shows it wasn’t the work of a single policy, mastermind, or economic theory, nor was it a morality tale of gentrification or crime. Instead, three New Yorks evolved in turn. After brutal retrenchment came the dazzling Koch Renaissance and the Dinkins years that left the city’s liberal traditions battered but laid the foundation for the safe streets and dotcom excess of Giuliani’s Reformation in the ‘90s. Then the planes hit on 9/11. The shaky city handed itself over to Bloomberg who merged City Hall into his personal empire, launching its Reimagination. From Hip Hop crews to Wall Street bankers, D.V. to Jay-Z, Dyja weaves New Yorkers famous, infamous, and unknown—Yuppies, hipsters, tech nerds, and artists; community organizers and the immigrants who made this a truly global place—into a narrative of a city creating ways of life that would ultimately change cities everywhere. With great success, though, came grave mistakes. The urbanism that reclaimed public space became a means of control, the police who made streets safe became an occupying army, technology went from a means to the end. Now, as anxiety fills New Yorker’s hearts and empties its public spaces, it’s clear that what brought the city back—proximity, density, and human exchange—are what sent Covid-19 burning through its streets, and the price of order has come due. A fourth evolution is happening and we must understand that the greatest challenge ahead is the one New York failed in the first three: The cures must not be worse than the disease. Exhaustively researched, passionately told, New York, New York, New York is a colorful, inspiring guide to not just rebuilding but reimagining a great city.

The Hasidic leader R. Nachman of Braslav (1772–1810) has held a place in the Jewish popular imagination for more than two centuries. Some see him as the (self-proclaimed) Messiah, others as the forerunner of modern Jewish literature. Existing studies struggle between these dueling readings, largely ignoring questions of aesthetics and politics in his work. A Permanent Beginning lays out a new paradigm for understanding R. Nachman's thought and writing, and, with them, the beginnings of Jewish literary modernity. Yitzhak Lewis examines the connections between imperial modernization processes in Eastern Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century and the emergence of "modern literature" in the storytelling of R. Nachman. Reading his tales and teachings alongside the social, legal, and intellectual history of the time, the book's guiding question is literary: How does R. Nachman represent this changing environment in his writing? Lewis paints a nuanced and fascinating portrait of a literary thinker and creative genius at the very moment his world was evolving unrecognizably. He argues compellingly that R. Nachman's narrative response to his changing world was a major point of departure for Jewish literary modernity.

Surprisingly New York City teems with hidden pockets of animal and plant life from peregrine falcons, snowy egrets, and diamondback terrapin to hallucinogenic mushrooms and carnivorous plants. This book is a beautifully illustrated celebration of the natural history and ecology of the city's five boroughs. full-color photo insert. 25 maps.